On Mar 16, 5:47 pm, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Bruce McFarling wrote:
> > When you see the language as operations doing things when told, rather
> > than as RPN operators on preceding text, that's half the hurdle
> > overcome right there.
> In other words, you learn to suppress your normal human language
> instinct instead of using its power.
Even accepting the arguable premises of the statement ...
.... the answer is, no, not in other words that.
Starting out by "teaching what it isn't" would be grossly ineffective
pedagogy ... to teach something, you start out by teaching what it is.
Learning the limits of something comes after learning its
possibilities.
And further, a computer programming language that gives your the
freedom to create a programming language with the syntax that you wish
it to have, rather than forces you to work within the syntax that the
implementer of the language decided you would work under ... that is
tapping a dimension of our human language instinct that no language
with a fixed syntax can. If humans were merely syntax users, and never
syntax creators, our natural languages would not be in a state of
constant evolution and flux, and all of our languages would exhibit
syntax close to our normal underlying language instincts, instead of
our learned languages displaying a quite remarkable diversity and
variety of quite extreme departures from our natural language
instinct.
It should be evident that any language that is going to excel in
giving programmers the ability to write languages where "how you say
it" can be tailored to the problem ... is itself going to be far more
focused on "how you do it" than "how you say it".
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